Mark Graham

Mark Graham 

Professor of Internet Geography   

Affiliation: Oxford Internet Institute
Expert in: Cities and migration, Employment
Geographic focus:  Global (I run projects in 29 countries on five continents). However, primarily Global South (SE Asia and Africa)

I have led three large-scale multi-country studies, which examine the production networks of digital work. This research analyses how workers in the world’s economic margins are enrolled into global value chains and a planetary labour market (for instance, looking at how Kenyan data entry workers or Filipino personal assistants are an integral part of some of the world’s most important digital production networks). It then seeks to examine how the networked and geographic positionalities of those workers impact on the working conditions that they experience.

Together with colleagues on three continents, I have started a participatory action research project called the Fairwork Foundation. This initiative, which I founded in 2018 and now run together with a group of labour lawyers and labour sociologists, has now grown to an international project team of 152 people in 29 countries. It has brought together key stakeholders around the world – including workers, trade unions, platforms, and policy makers – to set minimum fair work standards for the gig economy. Using a transparent methodology and a collectively-determined scoring system, we score gig economy work platforms and conduct extensive qualitative research on working conditions prior to releasing the scores. As of 2022, the project has released scorecards in 18 countries. Through our engagement activities we have already influenced 24 platforms to make pro-worker changes to their policies concerning minimum and living wages, fair contracts, anti-discrimination policies, and recognition of worker associations (see https://fair.work/ for more information).